The perfect custom e-commerce website for your business may be best left as a dream for now.

Most small businesses don’t need a custom e-commerce website. When an off the shelf product will work.

If your small business is tight on funds as most small businesses are. You don’t want to tie up your cash flow with a custom e-commerce dream site.

Think of it another way. Say you need to buy a car. Will you buy a car that’s already made and ready to go? Or would you order a custom made car, to your exact specifications? Are you prepared to pay for the extra cost and wait for it to be made for you?

And that’s after the time it will take to find a developer or company to make the site for you.

Almost everyone will choose a ready made car. So choose a ready made, easy to configure e-commerce solution.

Time, money and patience is required for custom software development.

Custom software development can really hurt, so do your research before committing to it.

Developing a customer e-commerce website can be very time consuming. Do you really need to try and “re-invent the wheel”?

The development process can also be annoying and irritating. More so if you don’t understand the technical aspect. Even seemingly small visual changes can seem to take way more time than you think they should.

You might start thinking…

“Am I being ripped off by my website developer?”

If you haven’t yet embarked down this process, pause and consider your options:

Pay to develop custom software to exactly meet your needs. Which could be a long frustrating expensive journey or

Use an existing e-commerce service like Shopify. Where in a few hours you could have a professional looking site live and ready to take orders.

I’m a software developer. Through years of experience of being paid to develop custom software. I recommend you avoid all the potential pains associated with option 1. Take option 2, start accepting orders today!

Save yourself the pain, take the easy way of using software. That you can then customize (within certain boundaries) for yourself!

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What are the advantages of switching to MariaDB from MySQL?

And are there any disadvantages?

If you like me, you may have only just heard about MariaDB. I came across it as a new option when adding a database to RackSpace Cloud hosting environment. After a quick read up about MariaDB and seeing that it was MySQL compatible. I thought why not give it a shot for the website I was working on. The website was a demo site, so there weren’t any concerns about production stability. Rackspace Cloud Hosting provided PHPMyAdmin for accessing the MariaDB. Just like you would have with MySQL. Everything appeared to look the same and work the same setting up the database. Once set-up I immediately saw that MariaDB is definitely faster than MySQL.

So what are the pros and cons for switching to MariaDB from MySQL?

Pros of MariaDB vs MySQL

MariaDB has better query performance.

MariaDB has more of an open source attitude.

Switching to MariaDB is easy.

Galera implementation is better in MariaDB.

MariaDB is available as an option with some hosting environments, like RackSpace Cloud.

MariaDB comes by default with some distros, like the Red Hat series.

I took a big site from MySQL to MariaDB with zero issues.

Cons of MariaDB vs MySQL

Switching back from MariaDB to MySQL may not be so easy.

If you are using AWS, Amazon Aurora may be even faster than MariaDB and MySQL.

Your Operating System may not support MariaDB yet.

Your hosting environment may not support MariaDB yet.

Percona may be an even better option than MariaDB.

As with all software there are new versions in development. Each release bringing better performance with it.

So if you are looking to switch from MySQL, make sure the benefits outweigh the risks.